Getting a musical education/Serotonin

A fellow worker, young and pretty, asked me the other day to recommend to her some good music. She's thinking of getting into jazz, although I don't know on what basis she made that statement. I told her that the only jazz disc that I have is the one that everybody has, namely Miles Davis' "Kind of blue".

Later on the evening, I was thinking about her question and realised that this was one of my dreams come true - the chance to 'educate' someone musically. So I started going over my eclectic collection in my head, trying to think of something which would be a good starting point. KOB would be good, but I couldn't find it. Most of my other discs are pretty strong stuff which need some form of introduction and I wouldn't like to start her off with something which takes a while to absorb.

So after much head scratching and internal debate, I settled on a retrospective disc by the Irish American group (sadly no longer existing) called Nightnoise. I've never been able to define their music to my satisfaction. They're part Celtic, part abstract, part new age and always interesting.

On another topic, I've put in a bit more listening time on Andrew Keeling's disc. I think that the only way that I'll be able to give it the attention it deserves is to rip the disc to mp3 and then transfer it to my little mp3 player; I listen to this when I go speed walking. My doctor would like me to walk three times a week for at least half an hour, but lately I've only been managing once a week. I should point out that these walks are not strolls - I average a speed of 6 km/hr which is certainly fast enough. It may not burn off many calories but certainly gets the metabolism going.

I read the other day that such exercise increases the amount of serotonin in the brain. According to Wikipedia, serotonin (a neurotransmitter) "is believed to play an important part of the biochemistry of depression, migraine, bipolar disorder and anxiety. It is also believed to be influential on sexuality and appetite". Drugs such as Prozac work by decreasing the amount of bound serotonin thus increasing the amount of 'free' serotonin. Without getting too technical, one can say that unbound serotonin is equivalent to happiness. Unfortunately, "Serotonin taken orally does not pass into the serotonergic pathways of the central nervous system, due to the blood-brain barrier preventing serotonin in the blood stream from affecting serotonin levels in the brain" (wiki again). So it's important to walk and increase one's serotonin level naturally!